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Epic Pakistani floods kill 422 and affects more than 4.7 million

PAKISTAN – Floods resulting from monsoon rains have killed 422 people and left nearly 3,000 injured across Pakistan, a disaster agency spokesman said Saturday. Some 350,000 people have been forced from their homes and another 4.7 million people affected by the flooding since August 22, Ahmed Kamal of the National Disaster Management Authority said. More than 15,000 villages have been affected and many houses destroyed or damaged in the past five weeks, he said. Pakistan has suffered a series of devastating inundations, affecting millions of people, in recent years. Flooding last year killed 470 people and impacted 9.1 million others, Kamal said. In the worst-affected area of Sindh province, in southeastern Pakistan, the waters submerged more than 4.5 million acres of farming land, damaging an estimated 80% of cash crops. Many in the country were at that point barely recovering from massive and deadly flooding in August 2010, which left a fifth of the country submerged by water, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. Those floods lasted for weeks, affecting more than 20 million people and leaving 1,985 people dead, Kamal said. Much of the land inundated in 2010 was in Punjab province, Pakistan’s breadbasket, where many people live off the soil and their livestock. Great hardship followed for millions in the wake of the flooding. -CNN

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